This challenging novel’s 39 chapters has two storylines, one about sheer survival by a dwindling group of migrants, the other about a man trying to make sense of the meaning of life. The survival chapters invoke Steinberg’s bleak landscapes and whiffs of Hobbes and Beckett. It describes seven (there were 14) humans walking westward through an endless steppe landscape during a contemporary autumn and winter. What do they flee from? Some from a life of endless toil, poverty or state madness, others never explain themselves. Some were bus driver, butcher or criminal. They hail from Kazakhstan, the Urals, Turkmenistan and communicate in Russian, except with the Ethiopian. He cannot communicate by language and faces increasing hostility with, ultimately, a stunning outcome…
Their ongoing suffering is alternated with tales from the life of Pontus Beg, police commissioner of a declining, corrupt border town near the former Iron Curtain. Once, people escaping from the former empire were shot, now the other side’s borders are impenetrable, making Michailopol an irrelevant outpost, esp. for people smugglers. Beg is a venal 53-year old, interested only in monthly sex and copious meals, with only an estranged sister for family. But also curious about his roots: old and new dreams and memories gradually awaken a keen interest in Judaism. He strikes up a friendship with, then becomes a pupil of the only surviving Jew in town, a rabbi who rues he is not Jewish anymore, because since his cook died, he lives on Chinese food from the restaurant next door.
The two stories converge when the five surviving migrants reach Michailopol, as thin and ragged as the Jews who survived a nearby Lager, as old residents comment. They are arrested and when a human head is found in their pitiful baggage, PC Beg, his head full of new ideas and perspectives on life and death, of flight and redemption, starts his investigations…
The title echoes the opening words of Bible book Exodus about the Jews’ flight from Egypt and their 40 years of wandering in search of their Promised Land. Both threads of the novel frequently allude to the tenets and traditions of the Old Faith. Found it a well-paced, deep book with plenty of resonance and justifying an immediate second reading. Moreover, it is full of authentic-sounding local context, Jewish history and theology, but I am a poor judge in such matters.
Challenging, full of pace and perhaps a novel fit for reading clubs open to new interpretations of Judaism and migration. Highly recommended.
